The present invention relates to digital image processing and techniques for reducing aliasing artifacts.
Digital image processing includes a wide variety of techniques for rendering artistic effects to a digital image, such as shading an image, blurring areas within the image, and embossing text. One image processing technique, referred to as table-shaping, replaces the pixel values of the digital image with new values defined by a lookup table. The values within the lookup table typically represent a transformation function (which may be thought of as, or defined by, a curve) such that the process shapes the digital image to achieve the desired artistic effect.
In the context of the Internet, such image-processing techniques are often applied to small images such as a small digital matte. A digital matte is a two-dimensional array having values representing either opacity or coverage. For example, small mattes are often used to represent coverage of a small typeface, such as 8–24 point fonts, or other small graphical elements such as push buttons. Because the image processing operation is often applied to a small number of pixels, the resultant image often exhibits aliasing artifacts such that objects within the image often have jagged edges.